RITA DUFFY - MID-TERM REPORT Denise Ferran assesses the art ...

stored from childhood and gleaned from
her extensive art education. These
images are woven together in a
Panathenic Frieze of life, pattern and
colour, which shows a little girl with her
two sisters encased in their private
world. The classical struggle of good
over evil, beauty over ugliness persists,
not in a Herculean epic but in the
unique life of one girl who describes her
childhood in painting and drawing.
There is washing on the line, bacon and
eggs frying on the pan, a dancer, singer
in the band and a menacing cowgirl. She
creates recession, views into rooms, the
backyard with its bin marked No. 6, the
row of red brick terrace houses on the
skyline. These individual roles she
selects and treats individually as Cowboy
Girl (Fig. 9) and Dancing (Fig. 12). She
is in the spotlight again, and at her feet
are memorabilia from past years. The
name 'Cowboy Girl' implies ambiguity of
sexual roles, the bewilderment of
puberty when toys are cast aside. The
background she treats like wallpaper
sprigged with shamrock sprays. The soft
tonalities of this work are in marked
contrast to the lurid reds of Dancing.
Two Women combines the tonality of
Cowboy Girl, with a dash of red in the
skirt of the girl on the left. These are
perturbing images of two women, one a
self-portrait of the artist standing
cradling her baby while her companion,
in this deserted olain. sits on a dustbin
in jeans holding a cupid on a fork. Her
shield is a dustbin lid, a reference to the women in the national
ist areas of Belfast and Derry, who, like a classical Greek chorus,
banged their dustbin lids in unison to warn of the approaching
British Army. This modern day Britannia has only the domestic
implements of bin and fork to defend her territory. Around her
feet seven little communicants walk in prayer - a reference, per
haps, to the innocence and purity of childhood. Devotion is
painted in the rich red ochres and siennas of an Egyptian wall
painting. One sister walks along with her feet solidly on the
ground while the younger girl, with hands clasped in prayer, lev
itates beside her. A girl walks with an angel to her left and
within her coat is a small image of a kneeling family of six. A
stoic air hovers over the two women. Suffering is seen in the
face of the woman on the left as she gazes into the distance. Is it
the welfare of her child that she fears for and feels she must
defend? Bearing children often dissipates women's creativity and
accommodating motherhood with creative work can be difficult.
RITA DUFFY - MID-TERM REPORT
7. Rita DUFFY: Jounley. 1995. Oil on wax paper, 116 x 122 cm. (Private collection). In this work Rita Duffy
recalls her childhood memories when she travelled in the car with her father and he pointed out the Belfast of
his boyhood.
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IRISH ARTS REVIEW
There is a combination of freedom of paint handling and
images of the countryside in the Aughamore Series (Fig. 11).
Duffy captures visits out of the city to her grandmother's farm,
chasing the white chicken in the farmyard then recording it
hung in preparation for the dinner table. References to some of
Marc Chagall's work are perceived in these painted experiences.
Many inhabitants of our Irish cities have relatives who live on
farms and summers were times to visit. Long days were spent
bringing turf from the bog, helping harvest the hay or carrying
water from the well and those lyrically-painted landscapes
become backdrops for her narratives.
Duffy combines in her work references to the universal strug
gle of women seeking emancipation, although she concentrates
on issues which relate to her own experiences of growing up as a
Catholic girl in Northern Ireland. She examines in paint and
comes to terms with her situation 'as a woman, a mother and an
artist within Northern Ireland'.' She explores imagery from 'the